


A Horticultural History of Max DeBryn

by Vita_S_West



Category: Endeavour (TV), Inspector Morse & Related Fandoms, Inspector Morse (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Domestic Fluff, Gardens & Gardening, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-01
Updated: 2020-05-01
Packaged: 2021-03-01 16:41:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23950261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vita_S_West/pseuds/Vita_S_West
Summary: Gertrude Jekyll, horticulturist, once said that it takes half of a lifetime to decide what to do with a garden and the other half to do it.Max had a late start to gardening and was keen to catch up. He fell into it in his student days, when he rented a room in a house with a dusty, barren backyard. A shed was supposed to be built there, but the landlord apparently never paid the builders, so it never materialized. Staring out his window at it for many evenings left Max with the impression of a fresh buried grave and, at other, less macabre times, a desert.
Relationships: Max DeBryn/Endeavour Morse
Comments: 6
Kudos: 27





	A Horticultural History of Max DeBryn

Gertrude Jekyll, horticulturist, once said that it takes half of a lifetime to decide what to do with a garden and the other half to do it. 

Max had a late start to gardening and was keen to catch up. He fell into it in his student days, when he rented a room in a house with a dusty, barren backyard. A shed was supposed to be built there, but the landlord apparently never paid the builders, so it never materialized. Staring out his window at it for many evenings left Max with the impression of a fresh buried grave and, at other, less macabre times, a desert.

He didn’t ask for permission or forgiveness as the landlord never stayed long enough to see the backyard. 

With many upsets and early failures, Max slowly drew seedlings from seeds, which grew and flowered under his care. For a time, his tulips, marigolds and cosmos, colours uncoordinated, were exactly what he wanted. The blooms gave his heart a thrill that tugged his mouth into an unconscious smile at each passing glance. With the misguided confidence of youth, Max had thought there was little more to gardening than growing flowers in neat little rows. 

Max treated his university and medical studies similarly. He would schedule and measure each hour, each class, every book, every subject, and every interaction of his day. His timetable, like his garden, was neatly ordered in little rows. I’s dotted and t’s crossed. 

As there were formulas in math and chemistry he had to learn by memory, so he thought there was a formula to life. A man was to get an education, a profession, a house, a wife and a family, more or less in that order.

With his garden and his schooling, he tasted a little experience and thought he had a great deal. He thought once he’d decided what he wanted to do and how to order his life thereafter, then that that was all he needed to know. Did it start in the classroom or in the garden?

Max moved into a fenced-in house in a fenced-in life, but hadn’t accounted for the loneliness.

His chosen profession necessitated him to be clinical and calculated, so Max had brought this approach to the other realms of his life. 

The blind certainty of youth was not shaken until a few dreadfully boring dates with an otherwise very nice young woman. Then it occurred to him that he had little interest in the completion of that aged formula. As he listened to her tell him in animated tones about Wilkie Collins, his mind kept wandering to when he could sit quietly in his garden. 

Max found with life and gardening, there was more to both than ordered prettiness. 

There was something more artful in finding the right climbing rose to cling to his garden wall. There was something more careful in cultivating the correct daisy—a relative of the black-eyed susan—to bloom from mid-summer to frost. There was something more deliberate in growing large-flowered dahlias. Max realized joy couldn’t be weighed or measured or scheduled. There was something more to life than getting married.

So, Max cultivated his talents just like he cultivated his gardens.

***

Gertrude Jekyll wrote, “As the critical faculty becomes keener, so does the standard of aim rise higher; and, year by year, the desired point seems always to elude attainment.”

The better Max got, the harder he worked and the more he tried to accomplish. Once he threw out the script, the possibilities were endless. He wanted a place to vent, to express himself and have complete control.

He wanted a bed of perennial flowers in perpetual bloom, from spring until frost.

But before he’d even entirely set that plan into motion, it wasn’t enough. It was the remainder of a youthful arrogance. He’d tasted an appetizer of success and thought he was ready for something entirely gourmet. Simply put, his eyes were too big for his skill set.

He dug a massive flowerbed right off his back steps. He jammed in a patchwork of annuals and perennials, a wild mixture of sizes and colours. He rejected old-fashioned gardener favourites, thinking less common dogwood and quince were better choices. Thinking that neither rows nor single plants would not create cohesion, Max planted in big patches, with several of the same plant in each patch, then repeated the patches throughout the rest of the garden, creating a crowded collage. There was still no cohesion.

Max soon learned his lesson with straying. The new, flashy stuff was less dependable, less hardy and less disease resistant. For all his efforts, he had cultivated a crowded garden full of brown stalks and wilted blooms before summer was half over. 

Max could imagine no greater shame as a gardener, than a barren garden.

He would have thought himself a man-made disaster, if it weren’t for the fact that he had met, not long after, and then spent time in the company of the curious paradox of a necrophobic homicide detective. Humanity came in all sorts, capable of all manner of blunder, he told himself as he set about correcting his garden plans for the following season.

***

In 1908, in _Colour in the Garden_ , Jekyll wrote, “Paint upon a palette, delighting our eyes with soul-satisfying pictures, a treasure of well set jewels a sympathy with growing things, fashioned into a dream of beauty, a place of perfect rest and refreshment of mind and body. This sense of beauty is a gift of God.”

Max rather liked the sound of that. He preferred to think his life’s work was the creation of something beautiful. It was an altogether different kind of mess—being up to his elbow in sowing new life after—compared how he spent his work day—up to his neck in death.

Max was content with the way his garden looked, its style. It was a cottage garden, loose and blowsy, nurtured over the years. It could get out of hand from time to time, but cultivating it had become something of a second nature to him.

Max had settled into middle age like it was a fine, cozy armchair. He hardly minded his wrinkles or greying hair. His back and knee pains were another story, but an unsurprising side effect. It wasn’t that life or its many pieces came easier—rather that he knew what to expect and how to navigate it. Occasionally, a new piece took root, growing wildly, casting shadows or overcrowding or threatening the health of other parts of his life. Max would either uproot it, cut it back or let the upset settle placidly, another wearisome piece to acclimatize to. Through it all, Max could muddle on well enough, even when the new addition became slightly pushier, more demanding of space or energy. Typically, Max would take offence those additions.

It was a bit different with Morse. 

When Morse came over, opera played loudly, books and dirty mugs appeared and accumulated on new and unexpected surfaces, and messes of inattention seeded and multiplied like weeds. Morse’s bouts of melancholy and these messes made Max feel like his house had become some sort of records office. An archive of Morse’s musings, interests, and irritations. 

Morse was the sort of man who had a deep appreciation and romanticization of beauty, though not for the work it took to cultivate it. He mostly kept the evidence of his visits to the house, though he liked the garden.

While they both required a great deal of work, they were two of the happiest points in Max’s life—Morse and his garden.

Mixing the one with the other, though, was not without its drama. Sometimes Morse tried to help in the garden and yanked up the wrong thing. Other times he merely got in the way and groused the whole time. Once he tried to gather up sticks and rake leaves around the juniper trees by the back fence and became covered with welts. In that case, he had demanded to know if William Blake himself had planted that bloody poison tree. 

Max knew that his decision to re-do the old back pathway left Morse with some irritation. Max knew he liked coming around, lazing in the back garden, in the sun, to take a nap and do his crossword. If Max were doing what Morse viewed as hard labour, then he would feel obligated to help. Max wouldn’t ask, but Morse, with something of sigh, would roll up his sleeves and get to work. 

Max didn’t ask, but he did count on it.

It was slogging work, requiring them to dig out the pea gravel and the limestone screenings base from the original path and sitting area, laying down new landscape liner to follow the revamped shapes, digging in the brick edging so that it was level and high enough to hold the gravel. They skimmed off the sod for the expanded garden bed. They laid a stepping stone path around the new bed. Several times Morse complained about the backbreaking nature of the work, but never once did he quit or go inside.

When Max suggested a birdbath, however, Morse had said, “You mean a buffet for the neighbour’s cat?”

They settled on some new birdfeeders instead.

Afterwards, after they had changed and cleaned up, they sat together with an after dinner drink, as they often did in the garden, examining their handiwork.

“It looks lovely,” Max said warmly, feeling more moved than usual in the waning evening light.

“It does,” Morse agreed. “Though I admit I wasn’t sure what was wrong with the old path.”

“It needed relaying. It was like that when I moved in and it never quite satisfied me. You noticed that bit at the end, where the gravel ended, but the grass was worn down to dirt?”

“Yes. Because you tread there so often, you made another path.”

“Quite right. Form follows function, you know. It’s a sign of a good garden. Now we have a path that reflects that.”

“Mm.” Morse took another sip of his drink.

“Like any garden,” Max mused, “the plan at the beginning is not where one end’s up. The path and the changes are part of the garden’s central design. Best laid plans...”

“Like anything in life. Does that make us mice or men?”

“The latter, one would hope.”

“One _would_ hope.”

Max's garden, like with life, hadn’t exactly happened how he’d planned, but it had come together rather well. Morse helped in unexpected ways, even as he hindered in many others. Form and function, peace and quiet, a good garden and lovely companion. _Natura artis magistra_. Nature is the teacher of art. What truer beauty, all in his cozy garden.


End file.
